From Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 15, 2020: An eyewitness excerpt from Fermilab founding director Robert Wilson is one many offered in this new retelling of the Trinity test, woven entirely from words that more than a dozen of the project’s protagonists first published in the Bulletin.
Author Archive
From Wired, July 14, 2020: Companies and universities have long relied on seminars to reduce racism, despite lackluster results. Maybe institution leaders can salvage the format. Fermilab scientist Brian Nord weighs in on the value of certain diversity-centered activities at academic institutions.
A collaboration of the Americas aims to take the first pioneering images of low-energy neutrinos and provide new data to shed light on the mysterious identity of dark matter.
A dash of virtual reality helps replicate the serendipitous interactions of an in-person conference when participants are scattered across the globe.
Fermilab scientists have broken their own world record for an accelerator magnet. In June, their demonstrator steering dipole magnet achieved a 14.5-tesla field, surpassing the field strength of their 14.1-tesla magnet, which set a record in 2019. This magnet test shows that scientists and engineers can address the demanding requirements for a future particle collider under discussion in the particle physics community.
From CERN Courier, July 7, 2020: A new generation of accelerator and reactor experiments is opening an era of high-precision neutrino measurements to tackle questions such as leptonic CP violation, the mass hierarchy and the possibility of a fourth “sterile” neutrino. These include the international Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment, hosted by Fermilab, and Fermilab’s NOvA and Short-Baseline Neutrino programs.
From Science, July 7, 2020: Spending panels in the U.S. House of Representatives have begun voting on bills to fund the government, and a few of them made use of an emergency mechanism to beef up research budgets. The national laboratories funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science is a big winner, receiving a one-time boost of $6.25 billion next year under a plan approved by a House spending panel, including funding for the Long-Baseline Neutrino Facility hosted by Fermilab.
From CERN Courier, July 7, 2020: Fermilab scientist Boris Kayser Texplains how neutrino physicists are now closing in on a crucial piece of evidence in a most convoluted detective story: the unknown origin of the matter–antimatter asymmetry observed in the universe.
From the Chicago Quantum Exchange, July 7, 2020: The Chicago Quantum Exchange has added to its community seven new corporate partners in computing, technology and finance that are working to bring about and primed to take advantage of the coming quantum revolution. These new industry partners are Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Quantum Design, Qubitekk, Rigetti Computing, and Zurich Instruments. The Chicago Quantum Exchange is anchored by the University of Chicago, Fermilab, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and it includes the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Northwestern University.
Physics courses have a reputation among university students: If you don’t do well, then you probably weren’t meant to study science after all. Studies have shown that those who face the worst consequences from this mentality are those who are already less likely to be found in many STEM fields: women, underrepresented minorities and students from low-income backgrounds. The SEISMIC project aims to make introductory STEM courses successful for everyone.